BY J. CLARA CHAN | HollywoodReporter.Com

As part of the name change, which highlights the company’s focus on the “metaverse,” Facebook will change its stock ticker to MVRS beginning Dec. 1.

Facebook is changing its corporate name to Meta as the company shifts its focus to virtual and augmented reality, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.

The rebranded company’s suite of apps — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — will not change names, but Meta’s stock ticker will change from FB to MVRS beginning Dec. 1.

“Starting today, our company is now Meta,” Zuckerberg said during Facebook Connect, the company’s annual AR/VR conference. “Now we have a new North Star to help bring the metaverse to life, and we have a new name that reflects the full breadth of what we do and the future that we want to help build. From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first.”

Zuckerberg said the brand change was needed because the company was “so tightly linked to one product,” namely its social media platform Facebook, that it couldn’t “possibly represent everything” that the company was doing in the present and future.

“Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said. “It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do, to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.”

On Monday, as the company reported its Q3 earnings, Zuckerberg also pledged to invest $10 billion toward the metaverse and cautioned that the company will not be profitable “anytime in the near future” due to its significant focus on AR and VR. For the next quarter, Facebook — now Meta — will report Reality Labs as its own segment, separate from the “family of apps” that includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.